Quote Originally Posted by Wayne View Post
Do you know how much water is required to cool a nuclear reactor? It's around 60,000 litres per second. And it has to be pure fresh water, that can not be recycled. Australia is the driest continent on earth (only Antarctica has less rain); and we are near our limits for domestic and agricultural use as it is. We are already draining more out of the ground than can be replenished. It is sheer stupidity to further damage the artisan basin. Dutton's concept - note it is not a funded plan - for nuclear power stations, sometime in the distant future, is pure political sophistry. The only interest he is serving are the half dozen mining billionaires who worry about having stranded assets of fossil fuels. You are a fool if you believe a word Dutton says.
That's not true. Water used in a nuke reactor is within a "closed loop". As it cools the core, the water is heated into steam which is then condensed and fed back into the loop. This closed loop needs to be kept 100% water tight in a normal functioning reactor because any leakage can result in thermal runaway due to loss of coolant.

That 60k litres a second figure is probably the amount of water that is used within the system, but it's certainly not "lost". The same 60k litres will again go through the system at some point as the system cycles through.